The present invention relates to the field of automatic document generation. The invention is particularly applicable to the automatic generation of documents such as powers of attorney or proxies which are intended to authorise a proxy to perform an action on behalf of a principal.
In many situations, an individual or legal entity is unable to carry out a specific action themselves, for practical reasons (distance, lack of time) and/or legal reasons (lack of authorisation to carry out this action oneself). This party thus needs to have this action carried out by another party, either an individual or legal entity, on its behalf.
By way of example, mention may be made of the proxy enabling an attorney or a firm of attorneys to represent a party before a national or regional jurisdiction in order to carry out legal and/or administrative procedures therein.
The management of such proxies can be a burden and complex in administrative terms. This is the case in particular in the common scenario wherein the party seeking to carry out an action before a plurality of jurisdictions contacts its usual attorney who is not himself authorised to perform said action in all the jurisdictions in question.
In such cases, the attorney relies on a network of attorneys authorised to represent his client before the various jurisdictions in question, and is responsible for having his client sign a different proxy for each jurisdiction wherein the action is to be carried out. This problem notably arises when performing procedures (filing, withdrawal, etc.) relating to patent, trademark or design and model applications.
In such a case, the attorney must contact the authorised parties one by one, receive the proxy forms one by one to be forwarded to the client (who issues the proxy) to sign, and then return them to the various attorneys in his network for the execution of the action before the various jurisdictions.
To simplify this management, systems and methods are known which are based on the collection of proxies which are scanned and stored in a database.
The management of such a proxy database is complex due to the fact that it must contain one document for each scenario liable to arise.
As such, the database must comprise equally well a general proxy relating to the filing of a patent in Europe in French and a specific proxy relating to the withdrawal of a trademark in Italy in Italian.
Such systems and methods simultaneously pose problems in respect of maintenance, information storage and retrieval efficiency, and use. In particular, with such systems or methods, amending a document requires said document be digitised again, which involves a drawback.
Furthermore, when an amendment applies to a group of documents, for example following a change of legislation in a particular jurisdiction, it is necessary to apply changes to each document concerned, which is time-consuming and/or a source of error.
Conventionally, the document to be generated includes a defined number of paragraphs, the content whereof is defined. Automatic document generation methods based on a paragraph database are known in the prior art. According to these methods, different paragraphs can be selected and associated together to form the document to be generated. By way of example, such a generation method to help draft contracts is known wherein a user accesses a computer interface using an Internet browser and selects the clauses to be added to the contract to be generated. During the generation of the contract, the paragraphs relating to the clauses selected are integrated automatically into a PDF type document.
Such a document generation method is suitable for automatically generating a single proxy for a given jurisdiction. Nevertheless, if the user seeks to obtain a proxy for another jurisdiction, the user must once again select the suitable paragraphs, which represents a waste of time.
Also, there is a need to automatically generate a plurality of documents based on a single input step by a user while enabling optimal database management.
In the prior art, various document generation methods are known wherein the paragraphs are pooled so as to limit the size of the paragraph database along with the maintenance thereof.
In practice, the generation methods according to the prior art require significant computing power. Furthermore, when a plurality of documents are generated simultaneously, the generation time is significant, which involves a drawback for users.
The aim of the invention is thus that of providing a solution for the problems and drawbacks mentioned above, among others.